Software applications, such as a software system embedded in a device like a mailing machine, typically create, operate on and store data in a particular pre-determined data format. Such software applications are often updated and/or revised one or more times during the life of the software. Many times, the updates and/or revisions to the software involve a change or changes to the format of the data that may be utilized by the software. In such cases, old, existing data (created and stored before the update or revision) cannot, in its present form, be utilized by the updated and/or revised software because the updated and/or revised software can only utilize data that is in the current (new) data format. The old, existing data, however, is often critical to the user of the software. It is thus frequently necessary that the old, existing data be made useable by the updated and/or revised software.
A number of prior art methods have been developed for making such old, existing data useable by an updated and/or revised software application. In one such method, a separate software utility is written and provided with the updated and/or revised version of the software. The separate software utility is written for a specific existing data format (the format of the data used by the software prior to the update and/or revision) and a specific new data format (the data format of the updated and/or revised software) and is used to convert the old, existing user data from the existing data format to the new data format. Because such prior art software utilities are specific to particular old and new data formats, they must be written for each specific software update and/or revision, and may not be used generically for any update and/or revision that involves a change in data format.
In another prior art method, the old, existing data is extracted and manually converted from a specific existing data format to a specific new data format. For example, the old, existing data may be exported to an Excel spreadsheet or the like, where it is modified to conform to the new data format. Once modified, the data may be imported by the updated and/or revised version of software for use thereby. This method, while allowing the old data to be used, is disadvantageous because it is labor intensive and requires specialized knowledge of the two particular data formats in question.